


Eyes Opened

by whitachi



Series: Seymour's Trio [2]
Category: Final Fantasy X
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 14:43:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/799879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitachi/pseuds/whitachi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Baaj is prone to earthquakes, and Seymour is not that steady himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eyes Opened

The stone underneath his cheek felt cold, much colder than what he touched with his hands. His hands had lost most of their feeling, and were starting to tinge grey. Everything was rather grey now, Seymour thought, and wondered if he should blame the sea. It seemed to ache to make the sky match its tones, to hide any comfort of warmth or light of the sun. But, then again, perhaps it was just him.

The cracks in the ceiling of the temple let in the rain and the wind, and the holes in the floor and walls made the air thick with the choking scent and taste of salt. At first when he had felt the sea enclosing around him from so far away, he had been frightened - a child again. After so long, though - how long had it been? - he had started to forget to notice. There were better things for him to concentrate on.

If he put his cheek to the floor of the grand hall of the temple, closed his eyes, and stopped breathing, and held still enough to nearly silence his own heart, he might be able to hear through the earth, through the seawater, through the stone of the fayth statue, and hear his mother's voice. Seymour listened very carefully now, for it could be any day that she called for him. She had stop answering him when he called to her a while ago.

His nails scraped against the stone, pushing them back away from the quick enough to ache. It would be true to say, he supposed, that she had stopped listening to him long before she stopped coming to him.

"Have faith," she had said when she held his face in her soft hands. "Have faith as I have always had faith in you, Seymour."

He closed his eyes to hear the echo of those last words in the stone; they were there, he knew, frozen and drowned by the ocean. Before the earthquake, he heard them as clear as the crashing waves, singing against his mind, but now they'd grown dim. How could he have faith in anything without her?

 

His sleeves had become worn to the elbows a while ago, and his mother had never taught him how to mend things for himself. Perhaps she had not known herself. The wife and child of a Grand Maester of Yevon should not have to think of such petty things.

His arms were cold now, and growing thin. Seymour wondered how his face would look now, but the mirrors were the first thing he shattered when his mother left him a second time. His blood then did not seem as red as her tears, but then, he was only half-human, after all. It had dried bright, though, when he wrote his pleas against the walls and floors, hoping she would hear him through the stone.

When he was alone, and afraid to call her to him again, he had waited days, perhaps a week, before he could walk to the temple. The path to the newly born Chamber of the Fayth was in open air, across a pathway marked by water on both sides. "Have faith," he told himself, but the echo came back only in his voice, small and weak. "Faith..."

When the winds were as calm as they could be, he crawled on his stomach across the path, tearing the ends of his robes and drawing more blood. He was careful to wipe himself clean before he curled against his mother's statue to finally rest. He could have faith in this, he knew, and could stay there forever without fear again.

He ran across the narrow path, heedless of the waves crashing beside him, to flee from the waves behind him as the ocean swallowed away half of the temple, fear outweighing fear.

Since then his mother had not come. She could not hear him through the water, he thought. And so he whispered to her, pressed to the stone, each word more holy than any prayer he'd ever spoken. She did not answer.

The sun was beginning to rise, casting away some of the grey. Seymour lifted his head from the stone to squint at the light coming through the wide hole in east wall as it blotted out his vision to white. He closed his eyes, and could hear the waves rocking against the cliffs, and beneath that, the faded echo of his mother's voice.

He worked to his feet slowly and moved his way to stand before the statue of the old Baaj fiend-god. The earthquakes had not harmed it, and even his mother had left it untouched. Baaj knew its own, and his mother would never destroy a symbol of faith, even to a heathen god. It grinned at him now, and he heard echoes again.

To be put in doubt was to be made more faithful. Seymour climbed into the lap of the stone fiend and rested his head against its cold chest, as he would to his mother in the worst of the storms. He had been faithful in the wrong things, said the silence of the stone heart. He had doubted in error. Faith can make you so blind, can't it? Why, there were much better things in the world to blame than the sea, weren't there?

 

Seymour's face ached to smile. He wondered if he looked like the Baaj-god, now, and almost hoped that he did.

*****

"Master Seymour! Master Seymour! Oh, praise be to Yevon..."

He opened his eyes to see the grimace (not a grin, now, he saw) of the fiend statue and wondered why it would praise Yevon. At the touch of warm fingers to his shoulder, he shrieked, raw voice echoing in the broken hall.

"Master Seymour, what has happened here?"

A handful of Guado were staring at him, eyes wide and faces pale. He looked back to the statue and wondered how he could have thought that it spoke to him, or even that he could have heard his mother.

"There was an earthquake." His voice was a shattered whisper, but he held the eyes of the servant that laid a hand on him as he shuddered back.

"An earthquake? ...where is your mother? Where are your attendants?"

Blind, he thought, and closed his eyes. You are all blind, and will stay blind until someone opens your eyes. "I am the only survivor."

 

Many hands were on him then, warming him and dressing him, shepherding him home over the blameless sea to Guadosalam, where he could be safe again. There, deep in the earth, many things were blind.


End file.
